The Post Christian Future Part One: Thinking Theologically About the Utopian Impulse, as a Perversion of the Judeo Christian Worldview

A Lecture from Dr. Michael S. Heiser at Future Congress 2013

I cannot overstate the importance of this lecture. Dr. Heiser presented this information in 2013. It’s 2023 as I write this and boy it’s relevant! Everyone in the Church needs to watch it, or at least, absorb the main points. It is critical that the Church understands these concepts because it’s part of understanding how we should live and respond to the world we currently live in. Heiser lays out these “elephant in the room” concepts so well!

I have provided the transcript below, with links in the text and my comments in the footnotes. Simply hover your mouse over the number to read the footnote. Clicking the number will link to the footnote at the bottom of the page.

Certain key sections have been emphasized in bold font. I haven’t had time to track down everything. Over time, I’ll try to add references, source material and evidence to backup these claims, but for now, it’s a best effort. If anyone is a researcher and has good source material, please contact me, and I will vet its quality, amending this blog with your material if it makes the cut.

Part Two can be watched here. ←

Part One Transcript:

“All right, well, thank you for coming. As you can see from the screen, and of course, you knew from your program that the topic is the first of two parts, The Post Christian Future Part One: Thinking Theologically About the Utopian Impulse, as a Perversion of the Judeo Christian Worldview. Now, I'll confess that this session, and you know, to some extent, the second one is sort of a thought experiment, on my part, because I have, I've had my head in the sequel to The Facade for a while now. And one of the trajectories I want to try to chase down is this thing that I'm calling here The Utopian Impulse. And that's in part prompted by where we are at culturally, it's also prompted by some of the, the cultural and political trajectories that I see, I mean, what we think of as conspiracy. And, you know, I think a lot of it is small ‘c’ conspiracy, but it's not actually new. There's always been sort of this impulse to either create the perfect society or more permanently force it on people. And so I see a looming on the horizon, a new effort at creating a wonderful, blissful, totalitarian state. And I want to sort of pursue that a little bit and talk about it. And, again, for those of you here, for those of you who listen, later to the presentation, I just want to get you thinking about why, why it is that this always seems to rear its ugly head.¹ And why even Christians, at times are not immune from this notion that we can make things perfect that we can just make it all right.² If we did this, that the other thing everything would be okay. So I want to try to think theologically about those things, and we'll see what happens. So here's our roadmap for the day, I'm going to be trying to define what I mean, and then give you the elements of utopianism, then I'll give you some examples. And then we'll move to an evaluation section. And I want to sort of strip away the mask of utopianism and then critique it a little bit, again, theologically, like a biblical theology, and then talk about how in the world did we get to where we're at. And sort of what we might be looking at. Again, these are going to be broad strokes in this session. In the next session, I'm going to be a little more specific, as far as what I think we're going to be having to deal with, as a believing community, as the real Church in the future.

So first part, definition and relevance. Utopia, as you may or may not know, again, is this idea of a perfect human society, the term itself refers to an ideal place that actually doesn't exist, it's imaginary. You know, it's conceptual, it's this grand wish, something that can't be real in the real world, but boy, we wish it was that sort of thing. And again, the breakdown. For the term utopia, no place a good or no place, you'll see it spelled either with the E, or with the, you know, O U, forming the U in either case, but it actually could have either derivation depending on who's using it. And again, imagine an imaginary world where social justice is achieved, whatever that means. And the means of guaranteeing all that are secure, that's where the control comes in. So that's what we're talking about. And as far as the impulse, what are the elements? I mean, what if you are utopian in your thinking, What are you thinking, what are you…what's in the forefront of your mind, and these things are not all present all the time, but they're all important to different utopian systems. So as far as elements, there's typically an ecological element and that is the idea that we ought to be existing in a harmonious relationship to nature. And the buzzword of course today is sustainability. But there's there's something to do with humanity's relationship to their environment, okay to its environment. So something to do with nature, the world you know, the current created order some would use the phrase creation of course, it means something entirely different than what you and I would mean. But again, there's some ecological element typically, there's always an economical element that usually focuses on egalitarian, thinking, egalitarian distribution so that everyone out there is just free from need. Again, we're going to talk about how this is spun. And then sort of what the reality always turns out to be. But as you as we go through this, I want you to be thinking, well, who in their right mind would oppose any of this?³ Well, you know, in principle, sure we'd like, you know, we're not in favor of, hey, you know, who all out there wants to rape the environment and pillage natural resources? I mean, nobody's gonna say, ‘yeah, let's go at that’. And, you know, we don't, we wouldn't say, ‘well, my optimal view of things would be that lots of people don't have enough to eat’, you know, so there we go. I mean, nobody's going to say something like that. So it's easy to sort of float the idea. But then where the rubber meets the road is always what exactly does that mean? And how is it accomplished?⁴ Other elements, political, again, this ambition for world peace again, who would want World War, or lots of war, freedom from crime? Again, these are all desirable things. The key is going to be though, again, how do we define what's a crime and what isn't? What's criminalized and what isn't? And then how do we bring this to pass? What are the enforcement mechanisms, and who's the target? So there's this political idea. And then there's an equality idea, equal rights, multiculturalism, and of course, gender neutrality, in our day, especially, is a big element of this. And again, these things are usually cast, or put opposite things like racism, and male domination, you know, defined again, as you know, something, a situation where, you know, earlier in our history, women couldn't own property, you know, 17th 18th century, even into the 19th century, didn't have control of their children in a divorce, you know, it was all, you know, male favoritism, all these things that we, you know, we'd look at now and say, Well, you know, that really wasn't a good idea. So yeah, sign me up for that. Okay. Again, there's, there's a way that it's marketed. But there's going to be a reality to it that doesn't quite conform to the marketing. Progress is a big element, this idea of human improvement, and that can mean improvement of life, you know, quality of life issues. But in our day and age, it often means improvement of the organism.⁵ Okay, in various ways that, again, some of which we would certainly buy into medically. But, you know, again, as I'm going to mention in the, in the next session, part two, this drifts into other areas that are kind of icky, okay, kind of, you know, things that, you know, probably wouldn't want to go down that road, because who knows where that's going to end, and how that's gonna go. Science and technology, of course, are always a part of this idea of progress. There's a religious element. And this has historically taken three forms one of three forms, you either have utopian communities that are anti-religious, and that is, you know, science and nature kind of rule the day, nature, in effect is really the substitute divinity. Then you have omni-religious, utopianism, where that's basically all religions blend into one either the effort to create some sort of unified religion, or it's an ineffective free-for-all and of course, that creates the condition that if you ever raise your hand and object to anything, then you're in the way, okay, then you're an obstacle to the utopian idea.⁶ And you will have also had Christian utopias historically, and some of these, you know, drifts into, you know, some wacky areas of theology, but others are, are more communal centered. And their theology is more or less what we would define as orthodox, but it really had to do with a lifestyle. So there's some variation here.

Examples of these elements in practice, again, there are political utopias, where, again, has nothing to do with any sort of religious impulse. There are some Christian utopias historically and then they're what I would term pseudo-Christian either things that sort of pass themselves off as Christian, but are theologically aberrant so you get all different kinds. In the ancient world, Genesis 2 describes the utopia that would be the one I would vote for; the good one. But it's again, an ideal state, it's the Edenic State. So that is part of biblical theology. Outside that, though, probably what scholars would point to as sort of the earliest utopian idea would be Plato's Republic. And you know, as we read this in the 21st century, there are things in there that would sort of make us recoil like, well, that can't be a good idea. But for Plato's day, it was really revolutionary. The idea is that he communicated here about an ideal society. Augustine with the City of God, again, Augustine is trying to argue that the world state is not the primary ideal, but again, this city of God, as he defined it, Christian community, you know, ruled by God, so on and so forth. And regardless of what you think about Augustine, you know, here's what a lot of what he says in here, could be could, could fall into the sort of innocuous or theologically abstract category. But a lot of his thinking was used later to legitimize the Crusades, for instance, we have to bring in the kingdom, we have to make the world our part of the world, we have to make it Christian, we have to make it the kingdom of God. And so that didn't end really well.⁷ So it's an example again, of, you know, we will realize that the papacy, of course, is motivating a lot of the crusades, and it was largely political. But again, it was sort of baptized, you know, using the ideas of Augustine and others. And it just went off in a misguided direction. And I would say in many ways, it was misguided from the beginning. 16th century, Calvin's Geneva, I know some of you might be John Calvin fans. And not to take away from Calvin's genius, you know, because, you know, he wrote, The Institute's when he was 29 years old, didn't have things like concordances, and Bible software and stuff like that. So the guy obviously has a lot going on upstairs. But the problem is, if you actually look at Calvin's Geneva, you probably wouldn't want to move there. He's throwing people in jail for referring to him as Mr. instead of Master. Someone smiles at a baptism. And so that's, that's prison time. And there are all sorts of things that if you read through the history of Calvin's Geneva, it had the feel of an attempted utopia, theocratic state. Run, of course, by Calvin. So, you know, there would be some things there that would make us uncomfortable. If you were living in Calvin's Geneva, you had better be a Calvinist, for instance, or just isn't going to turn out very well. Thomas Moore Utopia, this is where the term really entered the regular discourse with Moore's book, you know, more again, is casting this imaginary idea, in part as a critique, you know, for what he saw politically going on around him. But all of these literary attempts, I think are worth reading, because on the one hand, they show you what the person is thinking, and boy, wouldn't that be wonderful. And then you turn the page and you get into enforcement. All of them require power. They require power structures to make this work. Because guess what, people are not robots. And no matter how good you make it sound, at some point, there's going to be dissent. So what do you do with dissent? Well, we can't have dissent, because this is utopia. You know, we have to eliminate that. In the 17th century, we get Thomas Hobbes with his famous book Leviathan. Again, and this is the book that really focuses on the empowerment, the power situation of the state, over people, again, to enforce this sort of perceived ideal community. Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis is really an important book. This one has a significant influence in the United States of America. Because again, there were many, and it wasn't, you know, you didn't have to be sort of a dyed-in-the-wool Freemason, to think this way. But there were many who would have been outside Freemasonry, and just sort of in the Enlightenment discourse that would have looked at America as the new Atlantis.⁸ Again, this is the new utopia. We come here to get away from monarchy, to get away from the social ills that we see in Europe, and we get to basically start over and we get to reimagine what communal life should be; what the ideal state would be. And, you know, when Bacon writes The New Atlantis about this imaginary place somewhere else, you know, outside of Europe that people go to and really start this thing called civilization over again. When people you know, when America is discovered, of course, by Bacon's time it was known. But when people start to migrate in serious numbers to North America, that's what they're thinking. You know, this is the new Atlantis, this is the great country, the wonderful country where we get to actually conduct these experiments, you know, in, you know, reimagining what, what life should be like what the state should be, like.⁹ 18th century the Shakers, I'm from the East Coast, I'm from Pennsylvania originally grew up near the Shaker area, the Shaker community, and the Ephrata Cloister. In fact, my first daughter was born in Ephrata, not at the cloister. But the Shakers were a Christian community. So it was the effort to cloister but again, Christian. Again, there'll be some things going on there that you would sort of raise an eyebrow you might not recognize as Christian. But again, ostensibly, they were not atheists, certainly they were not secularists, you know, they're trying to do Christian things. They tend to be very strict in terms of celibacy. I don't think there are any Shakers left anymore. Again, celibacy was part of the problem there. I think the last Shaker died, like in the 1990s, or something like that. I mean, you could still go see the community. And then of course, the cloister, the cloister has more connections with Transcendentalism, and, you know, some of the, the quasi or overtly kinds of occult things later on in its history. But again, that's not exactly where it began. So you have, again, these sorts of early attempts at, let's go over, we create our own community, we have, we share our own goods in common. We have our own rules for the community, that sort of thing. We separate ourselves, we isolate ourselves from the mainstream way of doing things. The Enlightenment contributes a lot to, again, utopian thinking, the enlightenment, of course, terribly important, again, the age and elevation of reason, human reason, well, if you're in Europe, and you know, again, you've been living with centuries of monarchy, and you don't like aristocracy, and you see all the abuses there, the real, you know, strict division of classes and economic states, and you think, boy, we ought to be able to do this better, you know, that we ought to be able to think for ourselves, and we ought to have checks and balances in our government, we ought to have power divided among many, and all these political ideas we're familiar with that actually, are sort of launched in the enlightenment, well, they launch movements. Course, we have the American Revolution, which I have listed second here, but chronologically, it preceded the French Revolution, the American Revolution was a violent revolution. But as far as the transition of power, and the establishment of power within the community, you know, we had peaceful transitions, you know, from presidency to presidency, and so on and so forth. This is why after Washington left office, people were really nervous. But is this actually going to work? A, you know, it was a big deal that he stepped down after two terms that established the two-term tradition, it was not written into the Constitution initially, and had to come with an amendment. But when you had the transition to a new leader, and the election was really close, like a couple of electoral votes, you know, is there is this going to erupt into chaos and that sort of thing. And it didn't. The French Revolution is quite a different story. You know, what's going on over there was, on the one hand, we had a guy like Thomas Jefferson over here, who was a Francophile. Everybody knows that. And he thought the revolution was great in France, until, you know, this isn't like the Internet where you get instant information about what's really going on over there. So gradually, he starts hearing about, you know, children being guillotined and stuff like this and Robespierre and all this and he's like, wow, with that, that's just not really a good thing. I mean, so eventually, you know, he, it becomes distasteful, even to somebody like Jefferson, who was like all things France. But again, both of these things, even though they sort of work differently and took divergent paths, were fueled by the Enlightenment, Enlightenment ideas again, of building the ideal, the ideal state where everything's fair, everybody has enough that sort of thing. 19th century again we get the Second Great Awakening. I think actually, this contributes to utopianism as well, because of the rise of post-millennial thinking. And that is “we need to bring in the kingdom so that Jesus can come back”. That's what postmillennialism is now, postmillennialism in the 19th century was a big deal. Because, again, you know, we have this, it's hand in glove or works in tandem with populism because of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.¹⁰ And the way that industrial revolutions typically work, is that wealth, and of course with it, power and political influence comes into the hands of a few. Again, in the merchant class, we're thinking of people like J.P. Morgan, okay, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, this is the era for that. And again, I'm not saying that everything these guys did was bad, because it wasn't. A guy like Carnegie, you know, felt that it was, just immoral, to pass on your wealth. So that's why he decided to give it all away, you know, hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. You know, not everybody felt the same way as Carnegie. Carnegie, of course, wasn't perfect. Himself, you know, he had the problem with homesteadand all that. But because wealth is so heavy, highly concentrated in the hands of a few, and you get this real disparity between the wealthy elite, and then the worker, okay, that creates problems across the board economically for most of the population.¹¹ So it's a serious thing. And one of those that really suffered, were the farmers. Because people were moving from the rural parts of the country into the cities because of urbanization. Again, everything's becoming mechanized, you get factories, the whole factory system, the assembly line idea, the demographics in the country are changing dramatically, and the farmers are hurt by that. And they're also hurt by the fact that the money supply is controlled by a very few people. So to get a loan, I mean, lenders were charging 300% on a bank loan, you know, stuff like that, and farmers need capital to buy land, they need to buy machinery, so they're just getting killed. That all factors into the rise of the populist movement, which is a grassroots movement. Where again, we you know, as farmers unite, you know, we united labor, the farm industry, but then that becomes an appeal. Because right down here, you have Transcendentalism going on, at the same time, this, this sort of utopian idea of, of wonderful, harmonious coexistence with the land, again, with nature. And so you have in populism, again, these sort of murky ideas of, of the rise of the masses to create this wonderful, harmonious state, we want equality, we don't want this to classes and social classes and economic classes. And again, we're the farmers, we're the ones that are close to the land, we get our hands dirty, and you know, we ought to be doing sustainable. All this rhetoric was in place in the 19th century. And so that gets married to this idea of hey, you know, if we can pull this off, then Jesus can come back or Jesus will come back you had postmillennialism as an eschatological system develop during this time. And it actually led to very utopian thinking within the church.¹² William Jennings Bryan is probably the best example. He ran for president. I don't know how many times and he never won. Obviously, probably more famous for the Scopes Trial later on, but again, he was a significant figure in this whole era. Charles Finney, okay. Again, postmillennial thinking; this was a big deal. Transcendentalism I've mentioned again, Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau, the Alcotts, Walt Whitman, all these people. This was a more and I'll use the term "pagan" approach. And what I mean by pagan is, paganism is at heart it is about the worship of the earth. It's about this, this, this swap out for a personal transcendent deity. We're not we're going to do away with that and we're going to view nature as our divinity as our divine focus.¹³ It's very monistic I'll be talking about Monism a lot later this afternoon in part to the idea that everything is one you know, nature's God. As nature, everything that is unified all this, it's the Oprah Theology, you know today. So it all of this talk that we associate with the New Age movement and Oprah and all that sort of thing is Transcendentalism, you know, plus a few other threads to it, it's nothing new. But there were three communities that were deliberately started in this country that were transcendental utopian communities. And it was all about harmony with nature, and the ecosystems and all that stuff. Marxism of course, 19th century, an economic theory, again, really aimed at, you know, quote, unquote, leveling the playing field economically and getting rid of all these, you know, class divisions and class warfare to start revolutions to bring in what a better society a more, you know, egalitarian equal society. It's an inherently utopian idea. You know, again, an economic theory that, of course, takes different forms politically.¹⁴ Edward Bellamy, he was a novelist looking backward. Again, it's just a famous work describing a utopian community that looks a lot like he imagined himself to be in the year, I think it was 2000. He's writing in the 19th century. And so again, he's creating this vision for this ideal community, some of which some of it would would look, you know, oddly, like what we're looking at right now.¹⁵ Again, with some of the getting the control mechanisms and the way things are, but it was a very influential book at the time. 20th century, we get Progressivism, we've all heard a lot about that recently. Again, the idea of human progress all these utopian ideas, it's the same old stuff. Of course, with progressivism and HG Wells, with his works, A Modern Utopia, Men Like Gods, The Shape of Things to Come again utopian ideas and progressivism and HG Wells, of course, a lot of their thinking was influenced by Eugenics. Okay, again, you to create the ideal society, you need ideal people, right? You need to sort of weed out the unfortunate or less desirable elements to the human population. So that was very common in the United States. A lot of later Nazi eugenic theory and practice was drawn from American and British writing. And those were the seed beds to some of those things that would come later in Marxist-Leninism. Of course, this would be the Lenin experiment with Marxism, of course, the revolution of 1917. You know, again, the working class, we're going to create the community where the worker is in power. You know, I mean, we know how that worked. But again, ostensibly, this is how it's marketed. This is how it's, you know, it's put forth. Huxley's Brave New World was a critique, and some would say, a parody of HG Wells' utopian visions, because if you've ever read Brave New World, it's sort of the, you know, the world without pain, really the world without any sort of trouble. It's a utopian vision, but because of some of the stuff in there, you know, what you need to do with people and to people to accomplish this. It's very dystopian, it's very, you know, scary. And if you've never read Brave New World, I do recommend it.¹⁶ National Socialism, again, Nazism, again, used a lot of utopian thinking that utopian techniques, utopian goals, they tied race to it, specifically, in certain ways, there were certain occult threads that drove their view of the different races. Again, all of these things have more than one thread, but they're all attempts at creating the perfect state. And of course, the perfect state is always in the mind, the in the eye of the power holder, the one who gets to define all that. Communism is another example. George Orwell, again, Animal Farm and 1984 are obviously critiques of this. 1984 is one of the scarier books I've ever read. If you've not read 1984 I was gonna say I recommend it but in this day and age, maybe not. It might put you out on the ledge. Somebody might have to talk you off the ledge because a lot, a lot of 1984 you can see, man you can just implement this really with a snap of your fingers today.¹⁷ But 1984 is really, you know, frightening and Animal Farm is in its own way as well. Again, I recommend both of those. Atlas Shrugged is also utopian. Even though that's popular with a lot of conservatives, if you've read Atlas Shrugged and you know, I enjoyed the novel, but I recognize that the author is an atheist. And a lot of her, Ayn Rand's thinking is certainly contrary to good theology. It's an entertaining read, even though it's 1000 pages long. It's very clever. But Galt’s Gulch is a perfectly utopian community. If you've ever read the book, you know that. The hippy movement, the 1960s, again, bringing in the Age of Aquarius, where everybody's equal, and there's no war and all this stuff, again, the themes are familiar. Of course, the American left, as we know, it grew out of that. And you also have right-wing religious cults, you know, that there, again, it's utopianism, but just from a different trajectory, a different angle. So, again, none of this is really news. But I wanted to show you some examples anyway, just to sort of put it in your mind of what I'm talking about. Let's talk about what's really behind it. Now, the utopian impulse, again, pre-20th century again, this is how it's sold this column over here. And really the the modern reality as we've experienced it in the 20th century, and as I believe we will keep on experiencing it in the 21st century. So over here, here's how it's sold. Here's the marketing, oh, sustainability, shared resources, plenty for everybody freedom from need. And of course, over here, that means that food is under state control. That's the only way you can accomplish this today, okay, you have to have the food supply under control.¹⁸ And that means, and it explains why, and, you know, I'm hoping a lot of you are aware of this, if you want the copy of the slides, by the way, so that you can get to this link. Well, I'm not we're not connected to the internet here. But that link will show you I think, you know, half a dozen, seven to ten ways that already the food supply is being really controlled. And you know, things as simple as, you know, the family farm are being defined in such a way that they're being criminalized. This is not accidental. It's not that, you know, I'm, I'm still willing to say I realize there are a few people who absolutely know what they're doing here. But there are a lot of, you know, legislators that are frankly, clueless in a whole number of areas. And so they think that, you know, oh, I'm doing a good thing by voting yes, for this, because we don't want people to get sick. And on this farm, where, you know, things are not controlled, and there's no FDA and all that means, they think they're doing the right thing. What they're really doing is they're putting structures in place that will disallow anyone the right to feed themselves. Again, it will, it puts food under state control. There's a movie called Farmageddon a documentary, again, that one you might have to be talked in off the ledge, okay, after you, you watch that.¹⁹ But again, it's this sort of thing. And again, what's happening legislatively, but you have to have this to make this work today. So you know, food, of course, the Henry Kissinger quote, that food is a weapon.²⁰ Of course, it's sort of famous, or infamous, because we've actually done this, you know, in Korea, in Vietnam, you know, situations where part of the strategy was to keep the populations from getting food.²¹ I mean, that was just a tactic. So there's population control, there's deliberate shortages. Course, if you control the foods, food supply, you can put additives in there.²² You might also want to want to watch a film called…let me see if I can remember I can see the cover here in my head, Demographic Winter.²³ Okay, it is an absolute utter myth that the population is growing too large, the reverse is actually true. And again, this is me. This is Mike Heiser, this is Mike stick in the mud, Heiser. Okay. I am not given to exaggeration. I don't do my research on Billy Bob's website. Okay. I do peer-reviewed stuff. And you watch demographic winter. They're real scholars, they're real specialists in the fields, and it's very easy to document that we in the West are undergoing a dramatic demographic shift just by it's just a numbers game. That's why it's called demographic winter. Europe does not have the birth rates to sustain its population. We are right on the edge. There are five or six European countries that are actually under the demographic number required to sustain their own population, and the only communities that aren't conforming to that, within Europe, and within the US and other parts of the world are the Muslims, are the big ones. Because they, it's part of their it's both part of their religion and part of their political outlook to have big families in the West. And, you know, because we're civilized. And we have things like abortion, by the way, demographic winter is the hidden cost of abortion. The victimless crime, it is the hidden cost of abortion. And the people in the documentary actually go through that, you know, how abortion has led to this situation where we cannot sustain our population. So, you know, it gets into all sorts of stuff like that, but there are these shifts going on. And part of that the reason that that made me mentally rabbit trail is this additive thing. Again, there have been situations where it has been at least suggested and we can talk again, whether, you know, small c, Big C conspiracy kind of stuff, whether it's actually been implemented. And that's the controversial part. But the non-controversial part is that it's been talked about and could be done is you put additives in the food to kill off or to decrease the sperm supply. Okay, essentially, and that reduces, again, the population, eugenicists are very open, that we need lots and lots of people to die off, to have, you know, again, to have sustainability.²⁴ And rather than just sort of advocating, hey, we need a few world wars in succession, that will take care of the problem. Rather than do something like that. It's demographic control. That is just far more convenient and effective, and frankly, marketable. So, again, I recommend again, Farmageddon, Demographic Winter, there are actually two there's Demographic Winter that has a sequel to it, too. It's not exciting. It's kind of chilling. But you know, it's good stuff. It's real. You know, it's real scholarship. Political manipulation. And if you control the food supply, well, then it's kind of easy to get people to do what you want them to do, would you? Would you like to obey? Okay, or not eat? Okay, I'll wait for your answer. You know, it's not difficult to imagine. And again, you know, we have regulations that are keeping people again, from growing their own food, just by zoning regulations, you don't really, really realize the power of regulation, it's invisible. It's not overt, it's not, you know, in your face, you know, we're manipulating you, but, you know, who wants to go to the zoning hearings and stuff like this? You know, I mean, it's just boring. Like, I have a life to live, I'm not gonna go get involved in that. Are you kidding? And I don't know if I can even stay conscious. But you know, well, while you're, while we're thinking that it's just happening, again, it's just this invisible, laying in place of structures that are going to be called upon as precedent later you know, for certain things.²⁵ So we'll move on. Ecological, again, here's how it's sold in the harmony with nature, so on and so forth. God is in all the world that's Panentheism as opposed to God is nature God is the world, Pantheism, Environmentalism. Well, what you get is you get Neopaganism as civil religion, as the as the secular, cultural religion. Again, emphasizing the wonder of nature, the transcendence, think about the vocabulary I'm using here, because I'm using it deliberately. The transcendence of nature. We just get warm fuzzies, you know, thinking about that, but this is what you're talking about, you know, the idea of an eternal consciousness, your consciousness studies, spirituality, so on and so forth. These things are not new. You also get in some quarters, scientific materialism, as the civil religion, again, fueled by atheistic natural selection, which when combined with social Darwinism, again, applying principles of natural selection, survival of the fittest, to the way society operates to classes and class structures, and of course, eugenics as part of that nowadays, of course, we refer to eugenics as genetic engineering and genetic selection. Okay, genetics is just the new eugenics. And that's not to say, I'm not gonna, I'm not here to demonize all genetic research because that would just be ridiculous. But once you have the power of the genome in your hand, eugenics is like really easy. You know, it's just, it's just how do we, how do we accomplish this thing we can easily do now, on a wide scale? That's the only question you need to ask. Politically, of course, world peace, freedom from crime, who in their right mind would oppose that? Well, I'm not opposed to that I am opposed to statist fiefdoms that are, if you're a statist, you are anti-individual. Okay, think about that. So that means if you're in control, you get to criminalize practically anything, you know, criminalized self-protection, that would be like gun laws taking guns away, okay? We're going to criminalize your ability to protect yourself. Why because your emphasis is on the state. Okay, the utopia, as opposed to the individual citizens’ self-sustenance, we talked about that with the food supply. There's all always, you know, you have each individual state, you know, the state being defined as a country here, you know, trying to implement their view of perfection here their view of the ideal situation. But ultimately, you know, you have a push toward global government, and there's lots, this link right, in particular, here, again, doesn't lead to, you know, sort of a, a private researcher or something like that, that link will actually lead to an official federal government watchdog entity, you know, like an official media group, it's run through the Heritage Foundation, in fact.²⁶ So there are people, again, even within groups that, you know, the wider culture would recognize as credible, actually keeping their eye on global governance, because they know that it's real, there are really people, lots of people who want that. And since the Heritage Foundation, again, is focused on principles of individual liberty, they don't want that. So they're, you know, they're keeping their eye and it's a nice site because it's sort of a gateway or a clearinghouse for lots of information that that's official, you know, official documents on global governments because they collect that stuff and posted on the site. You, of course, the UN, which is inherently anti-national, it's inherently global. And Agenda 21, which I don't think we need to really comment any further on, because we sort of all know what that is. But all of these organizations, again, trying to push toward a global state, as opposed to, again, individual national states. Equality, of course, equal rights, multiculturalism, gender neutrality, you Christians are nuts, don't you want women to vote and all this, you want to go back to the 18th century. And, again, this is how it's marketed. This is how you're forced into sort of intellectual compliance. But their modern reality is that opposing views on any of these ideas, or anything related to them, are marginalized. And in some cases, there's an effort to criminalize any sort of opposition view. There's an inversion of sexual norms, basically, nothing is aberrant anymore. Because we can all just say it's biology, again, and we can say that because we now have nature as our God, or scientific materialism as our God. So we have perfectly consistent theology, you know, by saying, hey, it's just biological, everything's biological. And of course, if you disagree, then there must be something wrong with you. That's a psychosis. It, it is funny. But it's really not funny, because if you, if you look in some of the scientific literature, especially in psychiatry, they're defining, you know, your resistance to what appears to everyone else as normal and good. That's a psychosis. Okay, try to get health care. You know, and that's just the beginning of what can have how you can be manipulated and pushed into whatever direction so it's a serious thing. Of course, nationalist culture is going to be you know, vilified. Because we need to be multicultural. We need to be global. And so any sense, of individual sovereignty, of course, as we saw is like, well, what's up with that, and naturally, any sense of national sovereignty is going to be viewed as either aberrant or oppositional to the good that the global state could bring. Religion again, we saw earlier that we have some that are antireligious, omnireligious or Christian. In our day and age, we have really, we've really seen the rise of what I would call Militant Atheism as opposed to, you know, to "nice atheists" there are a lot more militant atheists again, and they're actually viewed as more reasonable and more tolerant. Tolerant is a big buzzword more tolerant than a lot of Christians. Why? Because the militant atheist will agree with, you know, the gender neutrality thing. It's all biological and all this stuff. You know, scientific materialism is, you know, the substitute for God, they're gonna agree with a lot of these things. And so there, they actually are marketed or market themselves or our market is more reasonable than these you know, stodgy old Christians. Omnireligious of course, paganism, again, being defined as the elevation, of nature to the status of deity. Paganism, the scientification, if that's a word, of the supernatural. Now think about that. You know, I don't know how many of you are into things like, you know, quantum physics and, you know, chaos theory and that sort of thing. I dabble in a lot of that stuff. I'm by no means an expert in it. But one of the things that you're seeing is basically using things like chaos theory and quantum theory, do not of necessity drive the conclusion that there is no immaterial reality. I know lots of physicists personally, that understand quantum theory very well. And they're Christians. There's and they're serious Christians. They don't they don't think it requires a substitute for the, for the truly nonmaterial. Well, we would, I don't like the term supernatural for this reason, because it has the word natural in it. But they, it's not a necessary conclusion. However, there are lots of people who will use the quote, unquote, new physics to basically attach a natural explanation to everything you thought was supernatural. Everything you thought was immaterial. And if it's all material, in some sense, then it's all natural. It's nature. Here we are back again. Intellectually, we complete the cycle to substituting nature the created world for the Creator. Blending them, that's what monism is. Okay. Monism. Again, the idea that everything is one on one is everything and all that stuff. There is no creator creation, creation distinction. You deny that if you're a monist. So, you know, we have this going on religiously. And of course, anti-Christian, basically, unless Christianity adapts to this, especially this in our day, I'm going to talk about this in the second session with not what I view as the new Gnosticism. It's going to be criminalized and demonized. Progress in human improvement, science, and technology. Human control is what this means in our day and age. So whereas we would call it progress, human improvement through science and technology, what it really means is control of people through science and technology.²⁷ We have information control, in other words, we will fill your head with what it needs to be filled with. Knowledge, of course, is power. It's easy to propagandize things like the political process. Eugenics, of course, that's progress, because we're weeding out, you know, we're clearing out the gene pool there. And that's a good thing. Police state, we have to have a police state to enforce progress. Commerce, of course, comes under state control. I mean, basically, everything you do. If it's viewed as being an impediment to progress, then it needs to be controlled, or eliminated. Okay, one of the two. I mean, we have to be able to keep the progress going. We don't want progress to stop. Now utopian impulse, as a biblical perversion. And this is where your handout comes in.²⁸ I'm gonna go through this quickly. And I'll tell you what the handout supplements. Here are the fundamental myths of utopianism. The idea that humans are perfectible, that's a myth. You know, it either on an individual level or a corporate level, it ignores you know, again, human capacity for evil. It ignores you know, the condition of the heart, but it's a myth that drives utopianism. The other myth is that you can force human perfectibility that just isn't going to work. So in forcing an Edenic state. In other words, it would be Eden by human effort. Eden created by a ruling human elite. Again, this is just this is mythology. So human utopias required total control and they are ultimately dystopias the opposite of what they claim to be. I would say this is all contrary to a Genesis theological narrative. It's contrary to the meaning of the Divine Image. Of course, if you've read any of my stuff, you know what my views on the image are, the image is not a thing put in you. It's not a quality. It is a status. It's a status that utilizes the qualities we have as humans. But if you say the image is a quality, then I don't know why you're anti-abortion. Okay, at least prior to brain formation, because you have no theological argument, then, if the image of God is a qualitative ability, I'm sorry, but the single-celled zygote after conception does not have any of that. So if that's your definition, you're in a lot of ethical deep water there. And it would be easy to, you know, undermine your view of abortion. So, my view is actually based on a point of Hebrew grammar, which I won't get into here, but the image is a status. We are created as God's imagers. We are to be him, we are to represent him. That's on an individual basis. So inherent within the image idea is the idea of freedom, free will, and individuality. It just goes with the program. Okay, it reflects what God is. Evil and the shared image. Again, there's a reason why there are plurals in Genesis. Again, because we are created in God's image, we have freewill. Freewill is an absolute necessity because it is a communicable attribute of God. If you were not free, if you could not make legitimate moral freewill decisions, there is no way you could be like God. And that's the point of the image, you're like him, you would be a robot. God is not a robot, God doesn't share the attribute of robot ability. Okay, it's just nothing like that. It's essential. And so again, we have this idea of being able to make a decision that there's freedom here and of course, that also means that we're going to have evil because people are going to choose poorly.²⁹ Genesis also democratizes the image, let us create humankind in our image, okay, it's it. That language in the ancient Near Eastern world is unique. Because the only people who represented God in the ancient Near Eastern world were who? The ruling elite, the kings. They were this is why they were conceived. And I mean, that metaphorically. They were considered to be either divine offspring or put in their positions by the gods. They were the gods’ representatives. Genesis says, no, it isn't just for the ruling elite. It's everybody. Everyone is an imager, every human being, and that's very contrary again to the utopian idea because again, we have to have these powerbrokers. You always have to have an elite to enforce the utopia. Human imperfection and mortality. Again, that is part and parcel of what we read in the Genesis, narrative, we are imperfect, we are mortal, we are less than God. We are not gods. And there is no such thing as this perfectibility. The assumption of authority and sovereignty, again, we will be as gods that whole again, misguided idea. Again, if you look at what happens in Genesis three, part of what the serpent says is true, that you know, when you do eat, your eyes will be open and you will become as Elohim.³⁰ That's what it says in the Hebrew. You will become as gods…it should be plural there because in verse 22, God says, well, the man and the woman had become as one of us. Okay, there's the plurality there. The idea being that look, now we have human beings, who now have assumed sovereignty. Whereas God was in control before, and God had laid out his will and said, Okay, there's this thing called Eden that you're living in. And wouldn't it be nice to stay here? Isn't this a wonderful place? You can stay here indefinitely, and you eat from the tree of life, you're gonna you're not gonna die, you're gonna have contingent immortality because I'm the only being that like, has immortality in and of Himself. But, you know, we'll set that aside. Wouldn't you like to stay here and live forever with me? Serve me and interact with you, wouldn't that be great? So, you know, God has this plan for human authority, human shared rulership, you know, with him and other humans and other non-human beings as well in Eden. And that gets corrupted as soon as humankind presumes the right to dictate the terms and to propel the program. So, you know, we have that going on here. And then we have separation from Eden again, and this is really something you know, absolutely against utopia. Now. Your handout is a fuller description of this symbiotic relationship between the biblical view of the Divine Council, God and God ruling through his Council on Earth, the way things should have been, and then once the Fall happens, you know, God's continued interaction with humanity again, through himself and through his Council. So what you have in those six pages, I've drawn excerpts from an article that I really like and would recommend, but they're excerpts that sort of trace the flow through the Bible of that idea. Okay, so that's what the handout is. Babel, again, is a big deal with this because if you understand what's going on at Babel, a ziggurat Tower of Babel was built to bring the divine to Earth. Okay, we're gonna build your house, we're gonna build your home because gods live on mountains. So let's like build our own mountains so that the deity will come here.³¹ And then when he comes here we can negotiate. You know, we can, we can kind of barter. It's the same logic of idolatry.³² Why do you know the ancient person wasn't an idiot? He knows that this thing he just made isn't his creator. So why did they make idols because they believe deities can be summoned to reside there, you locate the deity. This is why Israel was forbidden to make graven images because Yahweh cannot be tamed. Yahweh will not be brought anywhere for negotiation. That's up to him. Okay, it's a completely different perspective on it. But you have the same thing going on with Babel, we are going to reestablish Eden, and we are going to bring the deity back to Earth. We're separated from the deity now we got kicked out and all that stuff. We're going to bring the deity back down to earth, and then we're going to do all this stuff, all this good stuff. Well, again, it's a usurpation of God's plan and God's punishment. Humans trying to remedy and re-kickstart what they ruined. Okay, Babel is sort of the beginning living illustration of this idea that, hey, let's bring heaven to earth in utopian thinking. Heaven is not going to come to earth, until God wills and not before. But that's what the utopian misses or hates, take your pick, you know, one way or the other. So, again, you know, how did we get here, I have to wrap up. We've got all these forces again, you can I'll send you the slides and unless you want to watch it on the video, again, we've got all these things going in our culture, you know, all these political movements, you know, out of, you know, what I call lemming capitalism here as opposed to philanthropic capitalism, all these things, and really what it comes down to. I like this when checking our brains out at church, I think that's contributed, and checking the brain out of the pulpit. All these things have contributed to the future. Here's what I think for sure we're going to be looking at, we're going to be seeing more decline, more statist power, more emphasis of the state over the individual in this country. Technocracy, all these mechanisms used again, to control information to control behavior to control the population. And we're going to see a further marginalization of what we would look at as Biblical Christianity. And I think the solution to this is not going to be popular. But this is the proven solution.³³ And that is the church has to be willing to suffer in this generation for the next. It worked the first time. There were 13 people who pulled this off. 12 apostles and Paul, okay, they won and it worked, but it came at a huge cost. So we understand we can look at our world do you know what in the world are we going to do? I would suggest that we do what the apostles did and that and that that is not going to be easy. As Peter Peter tells us point blank here. You know, Paul, do you think Paul knew what he was talking about? "We felt that we had received the sentence of death burden beyond our strength" you know, all this stuff "despaired of life itself. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves, but on the God who raises the dead."³⁴ We thought we were dead, so will depend on the God who raises the dead that's not a popular solution. It doesn't involve forming militia groups. It doesn't involve, you know, taking the law into our own hands. But it is the tried and true method. It has worked in the past. And I would suggest it'll work again, it's just going to be a generational thing. We have to be willing to do that. So that is the end of the presentation. If you want to keep up with me, please follow me on Twitter. It's exciting. Let me tell you. More importantly, if you want information about the facades of the Special Edition or the sequel, please go to the site, facadethebook.com, and sign up on the email list, so that you get the alerts and the updates.³⁵ And of course, my contact information is on my homepage, too. So do we have any time at all? For questions? Probably not. We can cut it alright.

1. Several world powers throughout history have attempted to create a utopia, and have failed, every single time. This is because we live in a fallen world. The only utopia that will work is the Kingdom of God, and the heirs of that kingdom are Christ and those who follow him.

2. An ancient example is the Holy Roman Empire. A modern example might be what some Christians are attempting to do with the idea of Reconstructionism or Christian Nationalism. Note that I am not opposed to significant Christian influence on government and society, quite the opposite actually. However, we cannot establish Christianity as an official religion or theocracy as some within the Christian Nationalist movement are proposing, or coming very close to proposing. It’s true that we face grave threats to freedom and freedom of religion, both of which are God-given blessings, but our enemies in the spiritual realm and their temporal minions like to set traps on all sides. It’s also a possibility that God will ask us to suffer in order to accomplish his greater purposes. We, therefore, need to proceed carefully and prayerfully as we navigate the coming years.

3. I think this is why probably, at some point the entire world is going to welcome this proposed utopia, and it will probably come with a utopian savior, i.e. a false Christ. We are very close to version 1.0 with the W.E.F. Of course, it has been tried before with varying degrees of success. I can see the world social planners, i.e. the World Economic Forum and its partners in government and corporations (U.N., WHO, global corporations) working to design a chaotic situation where their utopian vision is the solution. This is Hegalian Dialectic 101. Create chaos and conflict behind the scenes while offering a solution at just the right time. It is a pattern that can be detected if you are paying attention.

4. No one in the general public usually asks this question. How do we actually accomplish this? People like to just grab onto the idea and repeat the talking points, to virtue signal. And when it comes time to vote for the politician who is up there virtue signaling, everyone is on board. But no one pays attention to the policy meetings where the actual plans are being made. This is where, if the general population paid attention, many of these things would not get as far as they do in the realm of policy.

5. More than simply enhanced health or lifespan, in other words, transhumanism, which is ultimately the destruction of humanity.

6. In the free-for-all version, objecting, for instance, to the immorality of the beliefs of others, for example, Christians objecting to immoral sexual practices of “pagans”.

7. As implied by Heiser, this isn't any better than a pagan utopia. Unfortunately, this tends to be what is advocated for in certain Christian Nationalist and Post-Millennial circles (that's not to say that all Christian Nationalists or Post-Millennials think this way).

8. This idea of a "New Atlantis" connects with the founding of America and the eschatological vision within Freemasonry and other pagan or new age sects, which includes a new global totalitarian order.

9. The American Experiment; successful to a point, but will it last? https://www.americanexperiment.org/

10. We have seen a rise in populism since 2016, interestingly, accompanied by an increase in postmillennialism as well. I would caution against extreme views within each of these categories while at the same time affirming the need for a libertarian populism in light of the push for global totalitarianism. This is where a Hegelian Dialectic comes into play. The idea of "arranging" a fight between two opposing sides, and guiding each side eventually into a preconceived "solution" that solves the conflict, i.e. global government and global religion, for example. But there is also a danger of national totalitarianism and forced national religion. The enemy (meaning the dark powers and principalities of the spiritual realm and their minions in the temporal realm, i.e. governments, corporations, and individuals who do their bidding, knowingly or unknowingly) has contingency plans for many scenarios. “Frankfurt School.” In _Wikipedia_, July 5, 2023 [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frankfurt_School&oldid=1163566431#Dialectical_method]

11. These are perfect conditions for the rise of Marxism because of how it takes advantage of the suffering of the poor, promising a utopian fix and casting the rich man as the "oppressor". We have seen a resurgence of this in recent years, targeting race more than wealth, but in many ways fusing the two, i.e. "white privilege". Unfortunately, this ideology has seeped into the discipline of biblical theology and thus, many churches and congregations have been compromised by this utopian vision. It gives the enemy of the true Church the ability to claim the authority of God (falsely) in its message.

12. We saw this in 2016-2020 with some of the religious leaders surrounding Trump and their "prophecies" and in 2023 we still have some of this, but to me, it seems tempered a bit at this time, probably because of those failed prophecies. However, I would expect some of those "prophets’" voices to become louder in the run-up to the 2024 election. It's not that people are wrong to seek solutions to the evils of our time, but we have to be cognizant of the fact that the enemy is playing both sides and has snares in place no matter which way we turn. As an American, I feel that we need to think critically and support people and ideas that maintain our Republic, as defined in the Constitution and as conceived of by our founders. We cannot compromise our form of government as a fix for some social ills.

13. Paganism can be a hard term to define. Ancient paganism was more about the worship of demigods, and during the Hellenistic period, because of syncretism, or the mixing of cultures and religions in the wake of Alexander's conquests, various beliefs became very hard to label. Although worship of demigods waned in favor of more transcendent Platonic views of reality, there also was a belief in personal saving deities in various cults such as Mithraism and of course, within Christianity. Modern paganism, or Neo-Paganism, as Mike suggests, often has a more "earth-worship" flavor to it, but even today, in our postmodern culture, the range of beliefs that might encompass "paganism" is large and so it can be hard to paint a broad brush.

14. I would highly recommend the works of Thomas Sowell for the best perspective on Marxism and related ideologies and how these affect us in 21st-century America. “Thomas Sowell.” In Wikipedia, July 11, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_Sowell&oldid=1164893743.

15. Mike said this in 2013. How much more true for us in 2023!

16. Even more enlightening is Huxley's Brave New World Revisited Aldous Huxley. Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited. Accessed July 13, 2023. http://archive.org/details/BraveNewWorld-and-BraveNewWorldRevisited.

17. In other words, the technology exists to make 1984 a reality and all that remains is the will and action to actually do it, and it could be done rapidly. Look at what happened with the mandates and lockdowns during the pandemic, how coordinated it was globally, and look at the activity around pandemic treaties, global currencies, global digital ID, and social credit scores. Black Mirror sort of stuff, but really this is Brave New World and 1984 type of stuff. In fact, here in 2023, it is not even a question of if this is being done, but rather it is an observation of what is being done in stages. This is often what people mean when they say things like "the vaccine is the mark of the beast.” They are using hyperbole. They do not mean that the vaccine, this vaccine, is the mark of the beast. What they mean is that, whatever it is, the vaccine, or social credit scores, etc. these things are being used and will be used to create this dystopian reality where everyone is controlled and dissent is eliminated. These people, unlike the majority of the clueless population, understand the inherent danger in allowing these types of things to exist and this type of power to be given over to certain organizations, governments, and corporations. In fact, the threat we face today is not communism, as many see it, but rather a global fascism based on pseudo-science, i.e. "technocracy" that is supported by the masses, who are being used as a weapon against those who are sounding alarm, and really, against themselves without realizing it.

18. Bill Gates, corporate farms, etc.

19. I assume this is the documentary he is talking about, but unsure since he lectured on this in 2013. Farmageddon - DOCUMENTARY MOVIE - Family Farms Providing Healthy Foods to Their Communities, 2022. Youtube.

20. I could not find where Kissinger actually said this, and indeed it is disputed, but he certainly is a globalist who promoted "food diplomacy" in the 1970s, which included food access for "friendly countries" (thereby excluding "unfriendly" countries and so it can be said that food has been used as a political weapon). This quote is also attributed to the US Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon and Ford, Earl Butz, and although journal articles claim he said that "food is a weapon" at the World Food Conference in Rome, in 1974, I could not find this in the conference minutes or anywhere in the media (I might have just missed it - or it didn't happen). Obviously, it is common sense and historical fact that using food as a weapon of war against one's enemies is a common strategy. It's not a huge leap to believe that food can be and is used as a political weapon, especially in light of the reality of Fifth Generation Warfare. What may not be as obvious is the fact that citizens of the world are considered the enemy of globalist eugenists that have been trying to reduce the world's population for decades. That is a bigger topic, but to many of us, it is the elephant in the room that no one in the mainstream is talking about or acknowledging. How Food Can Be Used As A Political Weapon, 2015. Thompson, Paul B., ed. “The Food Weapon and the Strategic Concept of Food Policy.” In The Ethics of Aid and Trade: U.S. Food Policy, Foreign Competition, and the Social Contract, 20–40. Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Public Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570766.002. Woertz, Eckart. “1061074 The Food Weapon: Geopolitics in the Middle East.” In Oil for Food: The Global Food Crisis and the Middle East, edited by Eckart Woertz, 0. Oxford University Press, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199659487.003.0005. Wallensteen, Peter. “Scarce Goods as Political Weapons: The Case of Food.” Journal of Peace Research 13, no. 4 (1976): 277–98. Krishnan, Armin. “Fifth Generation Warfare, Hybrid Warfare, and Gray Zone Conflict: A Comparison.” Journal of Strategic Security 15, no. 4 (2022): 14–31. “II. The Food Weapon.” NACLA’s Latin America and Empire Report 9, no. 7 (October 1, 1975): 12–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.1975.11724007.

21. Agent Orange, which was used to force the enemy out of the jungle, also had the effect of destroying their food supply. https://www.gao.gov/assets/Agent_Orange.pdf. I don't have time to fact-check Heiser's other comments but I think anyone reading this will get the picture. Food warfare is real. What is a larger topic is whether or not the governments of the world are doing this to their own citizens.

22. I may come back and add references here, but I remember reading the words of a social scientist from the early 20th century with the idea of controlling the behavior of the population through water additives. While this may not actually have been tried (some claim the Nazis did this but I haven't been able to confirm), it was definitely a consideration for the social engineers. I'll add a citation when I find it.

23. I'm not sure but I think this is the documentary he is referring to: Demographic Winter - the Decline of the Human Family (Full Movie), 2011.

24. I do not currently have time to validate all of his statements and provide references, but I will try to do so over time. If you're reading this and you are the researcher type, please feel free to message me sources and I will vet them and if they are good sources I will add them here.

25. This is exactly right, and this principle applies to every area of government. This is why it is important to pick an area of interest and be involved. Attend these boring meetings and make your voice heard. Become a board member or report on the content of the meetings on your blog and share on social media. Do something within your skillset. It makes a difference.

26. I don't have time to track down this link right now. I'll try to do this and update the transcript.

27. This is the true purpose of technocratic style government or technocracy.

28. The handout is available here: https://thedivinecouncil.com/FC2DChandout.pdf

29. Genesis 1-11; 3:5; 11:7

30. From Mike's slide in the video: "will be as elohim (gods)" - Genesis 3:5 (plural verbal; compare to 3:22b). Compare singular verbals + elohim everywhere else in Genesis 3 (vv. 8, 9, 13, 14, 21, 22a, 23). "Serpents" words are true, but not what God said.

31. Miqlat.org. “The Tower of Babel and Holy Ground.” Accessed July 15, 2023.

32. Heiser, Michael S. “The Logic of Idolatry.” Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016 2012.

33. 1 Peter 4:16-19

34. 2 Cor 1:8-10

35. facadethebook.com is no longer an active domain. Mike consolidated most everything at drmsh.com, which is maintained now after his passing.